Sideways Stories from Wayside School

As a child I read this book over and over again. Now I'm reading it to my 7 year old who giggles at the absurdity and cleverness.

Bought this to read to my kids. Paper feels like newsprint and like it was a mass production print, but the stories are why I bought it. Can't wait to read this again with the next generation.

He liked this book for school. Was funny he said

I adore this entire series. I loved them as a kid and have enjoyed revisiting with my own 7-year-old. A lot of punny humor, twisty jokes, and hijinks. This is recommended by my 8-year-old self as well as my 30-something self. Enjoy the fun humor!

I am an adult and I really enjoyed this book. It is basically a quirky book with a very short story for each of the students in one particular class, plus the two teachers. (The first teacher is mean and comes to a funny demise.) So there are thirty short stories. It is silly humor. For example, the mean teacher turns the students into apples, a girl tries to sell her toes (unsuccessfully), a dead rat disguises itself as a student, and so on. Warning: The humor is black humor, but hilarious. So you may want to pre-read this book to see if it is appropriate for your child. But despite being black humor, everything ends well and for the best, sort of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Junie B. Jones. This is not a "sweet" book, but it is fun!

I recently dug this book out from beneath a lot of my childhood stuff. My dad read it to me when I was just a little kid; at 18, I just reread it, and enjoyed it as much, if not more so--because now I could read between the lines.Thirty chapters. Each one is like a fable--an entertaining story, a nugget of truth woven into the fabric of each one. Peer pressure, politeness, standing up for yourself...sometimes the lessons are direct, sometimes they are subtle. Maybe kids won't understand them exactly, but they'll certainly remember the stories and remember the lessons thus.The story:There is something very wrong with Wayside School. It was built sideways--instead of one story with 30 rooms, is has 30 stories and one room per story. No nineteenth story, though, meaning that Miss Zarves, who teaches there, doesn't exist, either. At Wayside, students have the tendency to get turned into apples; those pesky dead rats, who live in the basement, are always trying to get into class; sleeping through class is considered educational; turning the lights on and off is a task not just anyone can do; you can help yourself to ice cream with the flavor of your fellow students, but please refrain from biting your classmates; the lunch lady just can't ruin milk, no matter how hard she tries; mosquito bites are great for counting purposes; your two missing teeth are the best in the whole world, as are the hat you aren't wearing and the joke you didn't tell; only being able to read upside down ain't much of a problem, after all; where toes cost a nickel apiece, unless they're little runts; trading names consists of spinning around really fast until you don't know who's who; if two plus two doesn't equal four, watch out; and where you need a reason to be sad, but not to be happy."Sideways Stories From Wayside School" by Lous Sachar is a classic. Buy it, for your kid, your sibling, your niece/nephew, or yourself. It's entertaing for all ages, and just might help its reader become a better person.

It opens with children-turned apples turning their teacher, Mrs. Gorf, into an apple and giving her to their gym teacher, Louis (the author) to eat.Need I say more?This book is hilarious. I could just see kids I know going to a school thirty stories tall, with a classroom on each side, struggling through torturous mosquito bites, a teacher who thinks you're a monkey, and all sorts of kooky and downright hilarious characters. I could read this over and over. It is so realistic, yet oh so spacy. I first read this book when I was about seven or eight. I have read it over and over with each of my five younger siblings and it gets funnier each time. Sachar has a way of appealing to all audiences.Parents, the Wayside school series is the easiest way to get boob-tube obsessed kids to read a good book for a change. And it is a good book!

Um, I liked SSFWS, all right, but I found the book to be very odd. Not purple-people-eater odd, but a-little-too-true odd. The book isn't just random silliness (although it does seem like it at times), but also very carefully disguised social commentary. I would liken it to Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss, in that, what at first seems like kooky insanity begins to morph into something much more, not sinister, but just a little too close to home. What really struck me about this book was that, despite the strangeness of his tales, Sancar obviously has an insiders eye when it comes to children, or a really good memory. The tales of the school tells about not only the students, but the teachers as well, with remarkable insight into the bizarre, rarely accurately observed world of elementary school in American suburbia. Oh sure, there are millions of stories about it, but few dare tread where this author goes with his story, and the results are, well, creepy-funny in a good way. It's like the anti-children's book, unrepentantly ammoral and without a tidy "happy ending" for each story. Oh yes, and, by the way, there's a story of the book for each story of the school. Few seem to notice that. The strangest thing about the book is not how the school is built, but how close the author consistantly gets to the things that make grade-schoolers tick. Few adults could understand how important it is for kids to get outside to recess fast enough to get the "good playgroud balls", or remember the strange kind of guilt that comes from stealing another kid's lunch. If you haven't read it, I would reccommend trying it at least once, if only to see how much you find yourself vividly remembering random episodes of your childhood in frightening detail.

This book was first read to me in the first grade. I am now in 8th, and have read it at least a million times. It is a hillarious book that can help kids see how everyone is different. Besides that, it's just so darn funny. I have read many books by Louis Sachar, and in my opinion he is the best author ever.